Mega Man X7 Preview

2003 is truly the year of Mega Man. By the end of this year, we'll have seen no fewer than six new entries in Capcom's venerable action series, and for good reason--this is the Blue Bomber's 15th year in the service of good robots everywhere. The next game up for release is Mega Man X7, the latest game (and the first on the PlayStation 2) in the long-running Mega Man X series. The original Mega Man games had a very quirky feel, with boss names like Cut Man and Metal Man and robot dogs that could turn into hoverboards, but the X series takes a slightly more serious, technologically themed and hard-edged approach. X7 is no exception, as it maintains many of the series' conventions, like the aforementioned futuristic theme and the X series' trademark animalistic bosses. However, fans of Mega Man X will find that the standard formula has been shaken up quite a bit, making X7 one of the more unique games to carry the Mega Man name in some time.

Interestingly, Mega Man X7 has a more complicated storyline than the typical imperative "fight the evil robots." The Red Alert Syndicate, a reploid crime organization, has been gaining power and terrorizing the populace, and its reign of terror needs to be stopped. This is the part where you'd expect Mega Man (referred to in the game simply as X) to save the day, but the Blue Bomber is having a moral crisis of sorts and has vanished from the crime-fighting scene. Thus it falls to X's rival Zero to take on the Red Alert Syndicate at the outset of the game. Zero won't be alone, though--the game's first action sequence introduces us to Axl, a teenage reploid and former member of the Red Alert group who wants to defect to the forces of good. Thus you'll initially take control of Zero and Axl while Mega Man is off wrestling with his conscience. Of course, he'll make an appearance later on; they couldn't call it Mega Man if he didn't. The story is rendered through both in-game dialogue scenes and some surprisingly stylish anime FMV sequences, and it's nice to see a little bit of drama being added to the otherwise nonstop action.

Mechanically, X7 seems at first glance to work more or less like previous games in the series, but play it for a few minutes and you'll quickly notice a lot of modifications to the formula. You can switch back and forth between Axl and Zero at will during a level, and each one has distinct abilities that are appropriate to various situations. Axl has a standard arm cannon that auto-targets nearby enemies, and you can cycle between available targets at the touch of a button. Axl also has the interesting ability to transform into certain enemies by acquiring their robotic DNA--he can accomplish this by zapping suitable foes with a special copy shot. Zero is a somewhat slower melee fighter that fights with his trademark laser sword, and to make up for his lack of a ranged attack, he can bat enemy projectiles back with a well-timed swing of this sword. Zero also has a double-jump move, and both characters can use dash and wall-jump abilities. Mega Man, once you finally acquire his services, has his standard arm cannon that can be charged for a more powerful shot. All three characters can receive upgrades by completing missions and defeating bosses (which can be tackled in any order)--Zero by gaining new attacks, Axl by recovering new DNA for better transformations, and Mega Man by equipping new armor pieces that enhance his defensive abilities. Finally, in addition to fighting evil robots, you'll be tasked with rescuing haplessly endangered reploids scattered throughout the game's levels. At the end of a mission you'll receive a report on how many of these innocent citizens you brought back and how many were destroyed due to your negligence, and you'll be rewarded if you did well enough.

The focus on characters that aren't Mega Man isn't the only thing that might take you by surprise in X7--there's also a pretty diverse mixture of 2D and 3D perspectives. Some levels pretty strictly adhere to standard 2D platform-jumping, and you'll find these are most similar to the action you're familiar with from previous games. Fairly often, though, the game will switch to a third-person 3D perspective. Your characters effectively play the same here as they do in the 2D portions, though aiming can sometimes be a little disorienting (especially with Zero's sword). You won't even tackle every mission in Mega Man X7 on foot, or at least not on your own feet. Occasionally you'll hop into a giant "ride armor," a big bipedal robot with its own health bar and massive firepower. The ride armor can auto-target enemies too, and you'll often need its heavy ordnance to clear enemies and obstacles that your characters' standard weapons can't touch. We even played one mission that featured a strange sort of racing sequence where we evaded obstacles and shot enemies while driving a hovercar over a futuristic highway, complete with big jumps.

From what we've played so far, Mega Man X7 is certainly more than just a rehash of previous games in the series. One other interesting thing to note is that Capcom seems to have seriously ramped up the difficulty level in this game. Since X7 is still a ways off from release, this may not represent the final balance you'll see in the retail version, but for now it's interesting that in an age where many games feel like a cakewalk, this latest in the esteemed action series is holding onto old-school standards of difficulty. Our build of the game was still entirely in Japanese, but we look forward to playing an English version soon to gauge how well everything--such as the story sequences and the upgrade system--works together.